March 25, 2009

Midweek Lessons

When you teach your 17-month-old son to play play, he will run up to you and throw said ball directly at your chest over and over again, even before you've had a single cup of coffee.

If your husband leaves to cloister himself in a hotel for writing purposes, you should go to sleep early instead of staying up to transfer laundry, because the baby will wake up more than early enough for you to get that load dry.

Especially if your husband is gone, you should not take out the oven drawer at 10:30 at night to reach under the stove and retrieve magnets that your little one doesn't even know exist cherishes and misses desperately.

When you try to replace the oven drawer, you will slice your little finger right open.

When you succeed in replacing the oven drawer, you will feel enormously competent. Out of all proportion to what you accomplished, in fact.

When you recount item #4, you'll be sure to add in some extraneous details involving so much blood and I almost fainted and I just hope it doesn't get infected.

After all that, you'll stay up even later to take a shower, because although you love your new haircut, it does require that your hair be nicely washed and not lank and limp and greasy.

To reward you for retrieving his precious magnets, baby will wake up at 1:30 and again at 6 am.

You will finally understand why your parents always prep the coffee the night before: on the mornings you really need it, the task of measuring out coffee and water seems hopelessly insurmountable.

You'll finally get around to making coffee after you settle the baby into his highchair with his egg, only to turn around and see the bowl on the floor and the egg all over the tray. You'll pick everything up and beg him to just eat his damn egg, please.

Once the coffee is made, you'll turn around and see the baby shaking his hands madly in his new "all done" sign. You'll obligingly get him down from his highchair and smugly think that your baby is a freaking genius, because how many 17-month-olds can learn a sign in less than 2 weeks?

You won't do any internet research to answer the question above, preferring instead to think your child is unique in his fearsome signing prowess.

Books

Azar Nafisi: Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in BooksPart feminist outcry against the Islamic regime in Iran, but mostly a love letter to books. Nafisi looks at Lolita, Daisy Miller, The Great Gatsby, and Pride and Prejudice not only as works of literature themselves, but through the lens of students during the heyday of the Islamic revolution. My only caveat? It helps to have read the books she discusses.

Lauren Weisberger: Everyone Worth KnowingI picked this up at the airport. After hearing about my grandmother's death I just couldn't deal with "Silent Spring," and this seemed less objectionable than Nora Roberts or Michael Crichton. I finished it, mainly to see if it could really keep up the flow of utter awfulness and banality right up until the end. Easily the worst book I've read since that romance novel about the Corgi. Avoid at all costs.